Criminal Trajectories
Further to our lively rumblings on crime and recidivism, including recent comments, Inquisitive Bird has some relevant data:
One illustrative example: people who are imprisoned in the United States have typically been arrested many times. An analysis showed that less than 5% of people admitted to prison had only been arrested the one time that led to the prison sentence… It was more common to have been arrested 30+ times than having only the single arrest that led to imprisonment. The median number of arrests was 9, and more than 3 out of 4 prisoners had been arrested 5+ times.
Another example is that nearly a third of shoplifting arrests in 2022 involved just 327 people, who collectively were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.
But the reality is even worse than this, for criminals (when asked) admit that have often committed dozens of crimes for every crime they were arrested for…
A corollary of the criminal power law is that a large fraction of crime can be prevented by addressing a surprisingly small number of persistent offenders…
In 2020, three prolific burglars were on the loose in Leinster, Ireland. Together they had accumulated over 200 convictions. But one day, they all died in a traffic accident. As a result, the robbery rate plummeted.
That would be this incident here. The gentlemen in question met their maker after colliding head-on with a lorry, while driving down the N7, at more than twice the speed limit, in the wrong direction. Their car, a stolen BMW 3 series, promptly burst into flames, making the identification of their remains a time-consuming endeavour.
Happily, the driver of the lorry survived.
Readers with an interest in the subject are advised to read the whole thing, in which eye-widening statistics abound, along with some rather sensible – and therefore terribly unfashionable – policy suggestions.
Update, via the comments:
Regarding the burglars’ demise, what catches the eye are the gushing tributes from friends and relatives, claiming, rather improbably, that the gleefully malevolent creatures were “too good for this stupid shitty world.”
As if the trio – whose activities included habitual burglary on a prodigious scale, and assaulting and mugging elderly couples and bedridden cancer patients – were somehow deserving of public sympathy. Not the numerous victims of their predations, mind, but the predators themselves. It does rather tell us something about the quality of those friends and relatives, their moral orientation.
Again, I miss the concept of shame.
Oh, and consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
A nuisance to the end.
As so often, what catches the eye are the gushing tributes from friends and relatives, claiming, rather improbably, that the gleefully malevolent creatures were “too good for this stupid shitty world.”
As if the trio – whose activities included habitual burglary on a prodigious scale, and assaulting and mugging elderly couples and bedridden cancer patients – were somehow deserving of public sympathy. Not the victims of their predations, mind, but the predators themselves. It does rather tell us something about the quality of those friends and relatives, their moral orientation.
Again, I miss the concept of shame.
Would it be callous to express hope that they were killed not instantly by the collision but slowly by the fire?
Keep going, you’re almost there…
Criminals exist within a subculture of tolerance, support, and approval. That subculture ought to be the target of official and unofficial intolerance of the most extreme sort.
That subculture consists not only of the criminals’ friends and family, but also of the “progressive minded people” who claim that criminals are “victims of society” who deserve our sympathy and who insist that we must treat them with utmost leniency.
I miss, as well, the concept of outlawry for society’s enemies.
[ Post updated. ]
This comes up frequently and while I’m somewhat inclined to agree with the general sentiment that crime can be dealt with, at least for now, by addressing that 5% or so, it is wishful thinking that the 5% is some sort of upper limit. As if the otherwise law abiding aren’t drawn to criminal behavior when they see the 5% so openly getting away with it. In recent progressive retail experience links, more and more persons of not-color seem to be showing up frequently. 5% is an encouraging number insofar as an indication that the problem is manageable if a society actually wants to address the problem but given how bloody f’n stupid our society is, I am not encouraged that the implied solution is the take-away from this for most people with influence.
Perhaps the single most important factor in the decline of Western civilization is that a large share of the incredibly stupid ideas come from persistently radical academics and their political implementers who are never held accountable for their actions. Unlike these criminal scum, their ridiculous, stupid, frequently proven wrong ideas are much more contagious.
The concept of “open classrooms” that was popular back in the 60’s/70’s comes up often among my friends and my wife, whose college degree was in early childhood education. We had recently been discussing one of the middle schools that was a feeder to my high school. Built in the early 70’s (I think) the roof had collapsed once in ’78, repaired, collapsed again a few years ago and was finally bulldozed and replaced. What an incredibly stupid idea. Let’s put hundreds of 12-14 year old kids all in one huge room, especially one without windows, and then try to teach them stuff. What? That’s not working? OK, we’ll just put up some flimsy partitions. A complete failure of a stupid idea. But no one paid for it. Except the stupid taxpayers. And the kids.
I’m trying to imagine how I’d react if one of my relatives had a, shall we say, extensive history of burglary, along with umpteen other crimes, and they subsequently died, injuring the innocent, while fleeing the police. It’s difficult to picture, as – so far as I’m aware – my sisters-in-law don’t make a habit of breaking into people’s homes or assaulting bedridden cancer patients.
And I think I would know if they did.
[ Makes note to pay more attention to family gossip. ]
That.
I miss the concept of government having a duty to the citizenry.
That they were free to continue their . . . activities . . . speaks to a fundamental dereliction by the constabulary and the courts.
I once again suggest a three-strikes-and-we-put-you-out-to-sea-on-a-fucking-raft policy.
Yes, but it’s not uncalled for.
Make the rafts out of papier-mâché.
And readers are welcome to suggest the particular sea.
Crime: long ago I lived in the South in a college town. Blacks were not yet POC but suffered actual discrimination. I lived in or visited the poor black parts of town often. Crime very very low. Jewish ghettos before WWII in many places (including NYC) were very poor and oppressed but had very low crime. Neither poverty nor discrimination cause crime. It is cultural.
The NYT has a profile of Rauch (sp) the second attempted assassin of Trump. They call him a crusader for social justice and highlight his charity work. Holy shit. The media have also scrubbed his social profiles.
Symbolism.
Or a “spend the rest of their lives in prison, making license plates” policy.
Random thought: How many movies from the 60’s and 70’s can we recall that glorified or at least sympathized with criminals and anti-social types.
I’ll start the list with Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
(Why only the 60’s and 70’s? Because that was before the further degradation of gangster rap culture.)
Ryan Routh.
I think it’s time to repeat a comment I posted here some months back:
An “exercise for the reader”: what to do about the 3 percent and the 7 percent.
Similar experience: I was born in the 50’s. My parents didn’t have much money, so we often shopped at stores in the poor black part of town–thrift stores, discount sections of chain department stores, and Goodwill/Salvation Army/St Vincent de Paul. It was perfectly safe to do so. But in the latter half of the 60’s this began to change. It would be unthinkable to go there today, and the stores nearly all gone.
Poking Wikipedia in search of bias.
Woman’s car torched when she refused to pay protection money to park on street.
Remember the old custom of shooting looters and arsonists on sight? Good times.
I know someone who claims to be a Wikipedia editor, and he has lied to my face about basic facts.
Perhaps the entire Wikipedia model is naively utopian.
But then the law-abiding, including victims of serious crime, will be coerced to pay for the food and heating and medical care of incorrigible miscreants, including, conceivably, the creatures who violated them.
Along with any other alleged necessities.
Rafts would be cheaper. And they needn’t be expensive rafts, or structurally sound.
You’re not wrong.
But it’s possible we can find work for them which is highly dangerous. Testing survival gear on Pluto, for instance. 😀
Concrete overshoes are even cheaper.
Shouldn’t you expect riotous behaviour at an event called ‘Riot Fest’?
Some of this really was white privilege. Whites were far more likely to get police protection/government action in those days. Blacks were left to their own, for the most part. Especially for theft, petty or otherwise. The black on black crime is probably the greatest driver of black poverty. The damage it does to trust amongst/between blacks is literally immeasurable.
Heh.™
I certainly expect a certain level of cluelessness from people who are attracted to things with “riot” in the name.
Speaking of both and criminal trajectories. (heed the warning)
Even in 1940, black crime levels were significantly higher than white crime levels. But still not as horrific as they are today. And somehow it was perfectly safe to take the El late at night to jazz clubs in Harlem or Chicago’s South Side. It was also safe to sleep in the park on hot summer nights. Thomas Sowell has written about this, and with vastly more personal experience than I have.
…it was perfectly safe to take the El late at night to jazz clubs in Harlem…
It’s the A train; You must take the A train, to go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem.
As I type, The Other Half is watching Magnum Force.
Which, for some reason, made me laugh.
In one day.
Speaking of crime: Oy, you got a loicense for that Amazon Prime Video?
Just tried watching A Very Royal Scandal. I lasted 15 minutes. Turns out that even an idealised version of Emily Maitlis, played by an actress, is still insufferable.
In 2023, on average, the U.S. received (?) 8,769 ‘migrants’ per day.
Governments aren’t failing to protect their nations, they’re actively subverting them.
I like that someone in the comments just posts a single photo of the Piranha Brothers. Pretty sure BBC is going to start nailing heads to the floor soon for non-payment.
Was he thinking Baba O’Reilly?
the Piranha Brothers.
@David, who said:
I agree with the observation you’re making here, but… I fear I have to make something of an opposing point, in order to maintain intellectual honesty.
That would be the same point I made to several acquaintances of mine who were members of the Seattle Police Department, men who denied to me that they had a problem with racism and unfair enforcement of the law: If you don’t self-police, someone will eventually do that for you.
The thing that’s struck me, down the years? Every time I’ve been around events, institutions, and people who demonstrated behaviors contrary to “good and decency”, there have been people in the surrounding social matrix who saw nothing wrong with what they were doing, and who would defend them to the death. Even in the face of outrageously compromising evidence.
You almost have to stand in awe of it, when you see it: Dude was on a fire department, and had spent a career of casually looting the scenes of death and fires, to include taking money out of wallets of people on gurneys in accidents. I mean, it was going on right in front of his peers, but because he was able to successfully pull off a portrayal of “hero fireman”, nobody ever questioned what he did. When the whole thing finally caught up with him, and they had video of him doing what he did routinely, everyone denied, denied, denied… Except for the lone rookie who’d “narked” on him, and then wound up blackballed from every department in the state.
This isn’t a phenomenon of social class, ethnicity, or anything else: It’s a pretty common human behavioral trait, an unfortunate one.
It’s also distressing to note that people often refuse to take action against peers, when they observe misconduct. Even the “good guys” look the other way, when they see cops and so forth on their left and right egregiously violating ethical standards, because “cops”. Same with doctors; they see malpractice by other doctors, they refuse to act. “I saw nothing…” They close ranks, defend, and the victims can’t do a damn thing about it.
What you’re seeing here isn’t necessarily down to “the black criminal class defending its own”, but “like defends like”. It takes a truly upstanding and courageous person to do like that rookie fireman did, and turn in his mentor for petty (and, not-so-petty…) theft. Given the price he paid, I suspect that man was more a hero than many an acclaimed one ever could be.
@WTP said:
This is typical of the lackwits working in “education”. You can name innumerable fads running through “education” for these last many decades, and you’ll discover nothing but unpunished failure.
“Whole Language”, anyone? “The New Math”? The latest math BS, whatever the hell it’s called? None of them actually, y’know… Work.
I don’t know what the hell happened that all these lackwits gravitated towards “education”, but the raw fact is that the end-product of their efforts has done nothing but go downhill since they got involved. At some point, the sheer weight of empiric evidence that what they’re doing ain’t working should have had effect. That was fifty-odd years ago, when I was a grade-school student. That this crap is still going on is a testimony to people’s susceptibility to charlatanism and “expert” authority. None of this crap works… All it does is dumb down the kids. My maternal grandmother graduated from a good highschool in Portland, Oregon back around 1916. She went from there to teaching in a one-room school up in the mountains of Eastern Oregon, and her students all managed, somehow, with a highschool diploma teacher at the helm, in attaining full literacy and numeracy. On a very limited budget, I might add; Grandmother had to chop her own firewood with the help of the older students. Today’s teacher, with the fancy facilities and all the lavish funding they get? Often does not produce students able to read or do math at grade level.
Do your own math as to why. I blame the bureaucracy and the infestation of our educational institutions with these lackwit dumbasses that seem to fall for every new fad dreamed up by their lackwit peers.
A friend from my middle school years, who went on to become a firefighter, his son became a cop. He got caught up in a scandal, well stood up to what was going on actually, where his supervisor was somehow getting guys to send him dickpics. Which he then used as kompromat to control them. He blew the story open, though nearly was persecuted himself.
“Blew” is doing a lot of work there.
That’s an excellent example, there. Kudos to that young cop…
At the risk of being repetitive, this sort of thing isn’t confined to any one element of society. Supposed “good guys” do it as often as the bad ones do, and that sad fact is far worse in my mind.
I expect skels to be skels, and do evil unrepentantly. I do not expect, nor will I tolerate, the “good” to do that same thing that they are supposed to be fighting.
What really pisses me off, however, is when I see things like what happened to Derek Chauvin, who basically got screwed over because he did precisely what his department taught him to do. The “great and the good” of the city he served then got in line to pull a train on his ass, and blame him for what happened that day, along with the other cops who were there. And, nobody spoke out… Not the trainers, not the people who wrote the manuals and policies, not any of them. They all folded their hands and piously went along with scapegoating all of the men they’d put in that position in the first place, while also lying their asses off about what actually killed George Floyd.
Our institutions are riddled with moral cowardice, and we reward that fact. Look at what happened in Minneapolis a few years back, surrounding the killing of Justine Damond, where a clearly compromised department put a totally unqualified man in uniform, gave him the literal “badge and a gun” to kill his victim… And, nobody in the “system” was held accountable for having done that.
Lack of accountability is what’s killing everything. If the planaria doesn’t get hit with the shock, it doesn’t move away from the source of the pain… If you want to fix something in a system like ours, there must be a credible and reliable threat of pain and retribution delivered unto the malefactors resident within.
And, that’s assuming that most of the denizens of these vast reef-structures of governance are even as smart as a flatworm… Which, to my mind? Ain’t all that good a bet.
This. And the rest of your comment as well. As much as I dislike denying the leftists agency for what goes on, I really despise those on the right for letting it happen. I was very relieved when my friend’s son was ultimately exonerated. When my friend first told me about what had happened…well I hadn’t seen him in about 40 years but he was one of the most decent people I had known…I was shocked when he told me what his son was going through. As unbelievable as it seemed, it also seemed to fit a pattern that I had seen elsewhere. Nothing anywhere near as bad as that but I was very concerned. More than I let on in talking to him. He’s a pretty upbeat guy and from what I can derive about his son (never met him but I have seen a few videos of him speaking), his son is as well. I cannot imagine how anyone less positive-thinking could have stood up to that. Not only was his department against him, but he had to fight elements of the city old boy (kinda) network as well.
Back in the early 1990s, California residents were finally fed up with rampant crime and a revolving door that let criminals (especially repeat offenders) back out on the streets in very short order – hence they passed a proposition that was 3 strikes and “out”. It was aimed at punishing career criminals — 2 serious felonies and a 3rd offense of misdemeanor or felony and BOOM enhancement that sent one to state prison.
Unexpectedly, crime went down. But soon the usual suspects were complaining that prisons were too crowded and racial disparities “proved” *systemic racism*.
Bovine effing excrement.
I started as a secretary at San Bernardino District Attorney’s office in 1998 … I’d be in county employ until retiring in 2020, moving up the ladder until I supervised 2 offices over a staff of 41 in support of 130 attorneys. I ran thousands of CLETS, handled police reports, posted files, created statistic reports, discovery procedures … etc etc etc and yes … CLETS alone (I’d say 90-95%) of defendants had multiple charges/convictions on their sheets. The “first time offender” with a clean rap did happen, but it was unusual enough to be noticed.
But most normal people outside the justice system are blissfully unaware of the crime that goes on in their neighborhoods/towns/cities until it happens to them. Then they are SHOCKED “Nothing like that happens HERE!”
Oh yes it does, Karen. You’re just too busy virtue signaling about how if criminals were just “given a job/food/housing” crime would disappear.
Pffffft. These people are not like you. Whether it was the culture they were raised in or just born sociopaths, they.are.not.like.you.
And so it goes. The whining leftists against 3 strikes (e.g. Erwin Chemerinsky who has remained Leftwing even as he & his wife were bullied in their own home by jew-hating law students) gained traction in both gelding 3 strikes and wiping out any significant penalty for petty theft.
The CA electorate is poised to finally making a correction by voting to reverse Prop47 but it will probably be too little too late and the Democrats will be sabotaging it at every opportunity.
‘College for everyone’ means more mid- and dim-wits pullulating in the halls of academe. Education is a simple subject – you only need a 6th grade education to teach a 5th grade pupil – so those with limited abilities gravitated to it.
To that effect, a striking reminder.
From the subsequent replies:
That, as they say.
I’ve mentioned before an episode of the long-running comedy-quiz show QI, in which Stephen Fry and his celebrity panellists touched on the ‘3 strikes’ policy with much tutting and condescension.
Viewers were given the impression that otherwise harmless and adorable people were being incarcerated simply for stealing “nine videotapes” or a few boxes of cookies. The assorted luvvies seemed oddly incurious about the rather more serious crimes that must have occurred previously. Nor did they seem interested in having those who’d been incarcerated roaming free in their own neighbourhoods, carjacking their neighbours, or breaking into their homes.
But everyone congratulated themselves on being so lofty and enlightened. Not like those redneck Americans and their silly, punitive ideas.
A recurring theme of the QI series is to show how common assumptions are sometimes wrong or misleading. So there was a certain unintended irony in seeing the left-of-centre politics of the host and panellists being affirmed by an eye-widening omission of facts. An omission that could not plausibly have been an accident.
When the series first aired, about 20 years ago, I would happily watch it. Fry can be funny, as can some of the guests. The bien-pensant politics was always there, of course, but it became more prominent, more uniform, and more grating, over time. This political default is seemingly taken for granted by its hosts and almost all of the panellists. In a show about the wrongness of things that are taken for granted.
The afore mentioned Chemerinsky was on – IIRC 60 minutes years ago – muttering darkly about the guy who, under 3 strikes, got the 25 to life sentence when he was convicted of stealing a slice of pizza.
OMG! A slice of pizza? How horrible to throw away his life over pizza!
Um. No. What is never explained 1) he didn’t just swipe it, he confronted a child holding pizza and threatened the kid into handing it over 2) His rap sheet was huge. He had oodles of felonies and misdemeanors on it — only 2 out of hundreds were designated ‘strikes’ by a judge.
“Strikes” were never automatic but had to be argued before a judge who then declares whether the charge itself qualifies as “a strike.”
I think part of it is that progressives, and indeed people generally, struggle to understand what it must be like to be the kind of person who can rapidly generate an extensive criminal CV, or to comprehend the kinds of motives typically in play.
Dozens of burglaries, assaults, and thefts. Countless, routine acts of degrading others, and shitting on their lives. A world of 85 IQs and zero impulse control, in which everything is now, and in which the defining ethos is absolute selfishness.
Instead, the progressive worldview seems based on an assumption, or a need to believe, that the typical violent criminal is somehow just like them, only more oppressed, and maybe not quite so good at mental arithmetic. Which is, to say the least, wildly incorrect.
I’m a heartless asshole. I’ll be the first to admit that fact, and acknowledge it.
When I was being a heartless asshole on a professional basis, as a non-commissioned officer in the US Army, it quite often struck me and the rest of the great unwashed that were the majority of my peers that 10% of the troops took up 90% of our time, in terms of disciplinary “cost”. Perhaps 3% were actively real criminal dirtbags, but the overall numbers were always in that 1 to 9 ratio.
This ties in with the criminality question because of the fact that you generally find that it’s always the same 10%, inside and outside the military, that are doing the negative things like driving drunk and stealing. Always the same ones, always the same sort of idiotic lackwittery on display. And, what’s worse? They never, ever learned, being incapable of that. They were mostly dumber than flatworms; you could continually whack them on the head, and they’d still go for the light of criminal activity as though they were moths to a flame.
This being the case, I long ago came to the conclusion that there’s no reforming that 10%, and that you would be a lot better off if you simply let them self-identify and then either broke them up for parts or otherwise eliminated them from civilized company. They cost waaaaaay more than they will ever contribute. As such, I would suggest that they’d make great involuntary organ donors, once they convincingly demonstrated that they were beyond reform.
Heartless? Well, have you ever tried explaining to a little girl why her mommy and daddy won’t be coming home, because a drunk driver with four convictions for that crime killed them?
Ever watch that sumbitch get off for negligent homicide, because the on-scene cops failed to dot their “i’s” and cross their “t’s”?
Had the signal experience of being on the periphery of that incident, and I suffered a bit of an epiphany: Not every life is of equal value, and to say that such creatures deserve consideration and mercy? Utter folly; that specific asshole acquired two more convictions for DWI, killed another person, and finally managed to kill himself while driving drunk and wrapping his car around a tree.
At least three people would still be alive, if they’d have performed a post-natal abortion on his ass after the third DWI. I’m enough of an asshole to think that it was a pity that they didn’t. I still think they should have used him as an organ donor after number three…
While I’m generally sypathetic to the notion that the current legal system does a very poor job of sifting the rehabilable from the incorrigible, I also live in a country where the government declared martial law against people whose crime was wanting to go outside occasionally.
Any power you give the government will eventually be used against you. There is strong evidence that innocent people have been put to death in states which still have the death penalty. I’m not prepared to grant the government even more power to exterminate its own citizens.
@Daniel Ream, who said:
Your basic problem is that you’ve allowed your government to become infested with the same sort of scum that we’re talking about, the essentially criminal. You don’t solve that problem by eschewing taking action against them; you solve it by fixing your system such that you can trust your government to do the right thing.
The sad fact is this: Civilization springs from within the man, not the institutions that man creates. The institutions are what are failing, mostly because we’ve invested far too much power into them, and that power has served as an attractant for the utter scum that now infest the hierarchy.
Whose fault is that, pray tell? Our own. Why? Because we allowed these creatures to exist as the parasites they are. Were we vigilant, and cognizant, we’d see these sick cretinous power-seekers for what they are, and we’d have kept them from the positions they now occupy and use against us. We got here through lack of forthright care, not anything else.
If you cannot trust your institutions to “do the right thing”, then you’ve failed as a participant in those institutions. It’s that damn simple; you can’t trust your government? Who the hell does that government consist of? Alien space bats, or your fellow citizens? Why do you consent to their abuse of you and your liberties?
The sad fact is that you either live with the criminally inclined, who’re essentially impossible to reform, or you eliminate them when they commit their acts. If you’ve allowed your mechanisms of control to become corrupted and taken over by the mendacious? That’s your damn fault, and you’re going to suffer for it, because now you not only have to deal with the criminally inclined, but with the petty tyrants you’ve allowed to take over the system meant to control the activities of the first group.
The entire unfortunate situation we’ve allowed to grow up like a systemic cancer stems from the root fact that we’ve invested too much power into these institutions, and signally failed to hold the people in them to account. If there weren’t such things as sovereign immunity for prosecutors and politicians, you’d see a damn sight less abuse. Anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to allow prosecutors immunity for abusing their power of life over death is an utter idiot, but that’s precisely what we’ve done. You want to have that sort of power, you need to be accountable for your actions. Which means, sweetie, that if you’re a prosecutor responsible for wrongful conviction, then you get to suffer the same penalty. Up to and including capital punishment. Same-same with anyone perjuring themselves… You testilie, as the phrase goes? You do the maximum time allotted for the crime you lied about someone else committing.
We are not coming out of this era of criminality by any other means than establishing, yet again, the rule of law and then enforcing it with draconian rigor. Having done that, and it will include a hell of a lot of individual cases of less-than-perfect justice, we would do well to ensure that we don’t lose the bubble yet again. The cyclic nature of this crap just pisses me the hell off; it’s just endless rounds of licence followed by repression followed by licence. Set a standard, enforce it evenly and consistently.
In the end, you have to maintain sight of the fact that the justice system doesn’t exist to further the ideal of justice; that’s an unattainable abstract idea that only God can produce. Human legal systems exist only to serve as behavioral conditioning structures such that we can try to live together without too much slaughter resulting from a state of nature. Nothing else; it ain’t perfectible, and it ain’t pretty.
Even those people who read the papers, because most crimes do not get reported in the news. Newspapers used to have a section–called a police blotter?–in which virtually all crimes and arrests were briefly noted, often with mugshots. But nowadays most crimes and arrests are not reported, and follow-up reporting is rare. (That motorcyclist who was run over: Did he survive? Those late night robberies, what were the witness descriptions of the suspects?) I would happily pay for a subscription to a service that faithfully reported such news accurately and completely.
There are some municipalities that release full crime reports, and sometimes one can find online interactive crime maps. But the left continues to oppose this because it is “racist” to allow citizens to know how much crime occurs in any neighborhood.
Case in point: The neighborhood a left-wing relative is thinking of retiring to. It looks nice during the day, and it’s very convenient to culture, restaurants, parks, beach, etc. BUT, there is street crime even during the day–I’ve witnessed some. (So much, in fact, that during the summer months a police mobile command center is permanently parked 100-200 yards from the condo she wants to buy.) I am sure the nighttime crime levels are far higher. Who wants to live where it is unsafe to be out after dark, especially if one is elderly? I won’t even try to persuade her to look elsewhere, as she’s an unteachable leftist who sees opponents of BLM and DEI as evil racists.
Would that Fry’s smug pudgy face met with a mugger’s fist.
Many (most of them, I’ll wager) do not struggle at all. They expend no effort because they don’t want to know the truth. They know what they know and those who say differently are evil people to be ignored and then silenced.
CLETS: California Law Enforcement Telecom System? For rapid access to nationwide crime databases, background checks, etc?
If you’re wondering if the system will learn anything from the burglarque accident, the Irish Garda (police officer) will be tried for reckless endangerment.
I can see the point that following them might have been dangerous but the alternative is that burglars might always decide to endanger the lives of others if they know they just need to head the wrong way on the motorway to evade capture.
This. My emphasis of course.
Certainly I struggle to understand what it must be like but I don’t take my difficulties as proof of troglodytic malevolence on the part of those who would imprison the malefactors.
It’s worth noting that babies are born with distinct personalities–bold/fearful, cheerful/grumpy, social/anti-social, etc. Even with the best of parents, some kids are just born with personality traits that make it difficult or impossible to socialize them.
Liberals and leftists, still wedded to the Blank Slate delusion, hate this and anathematize those who point it out.
I miss the concept of the “bad seed”.
That’s an error right there: I don’t have to “understand what it must be like to be” a wild animal in order to know that tigers and komodo dragons are dangerous to be around.
This is precisely how/why it works:
https://x.com/Gitabushi/status/1837189704707625247
Yes. AKA “rap sheets”. Limited access granted via training & certification. Accessing it, too, with an identification code and reason box to be filled in as the state did regular audits and you’d better have a case/report number to refer to and not be running a rap on your daughter’s boyfriend.
IIRC, per the earlier article, that is a favoured gambit.
See Graham Frederick Young.
Re. tributes for dead douchebags: how about this?
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/funeral-talented-footballer-thomas-healy-24489370
If you can’t be bothered to read through the linked article, it’s about the 14-year-old victim of a tragic accident; a talented football player and musician. According to a relative of the family who’s a TD (Irish equivalent of an MP), Thomas would have played for the county. There’s a picture of the poor young boy when he would have been about ten, with the caption “Tragic youngster Thomas Healy, killed in horror road crash in Kerry”. There’s just one sentence which gives the game away: “The car he was driving crashed at around 1.10am on the Ross Road, near Ross Castle, in Killarney, Co Kerry.” [Emphasis mine, natch.] (The report of the accident from a few days earlier notes that Master Healey had wrapped the car around a tree.) The rest of the linked article comprises gushing tributes from friends and family.
Yep – a 14-year-old boy is driving a [possibly stolen- we’re not told] car in the early hours of the morning. But apart from that single line, the article is all about the tragic waste of a glorious young life, the anguish of his family and friends, etc, etc.
Whose fault is that, pray tell? Our own
You’re new here; I’ve been pointing out for some time that the West is heading for an inevitable violent civil war over these issues. The most likely result of that is not a shining new republic, but an oppressive, corrupt tyranny.
Bezmenov tried to warn us.
From the link:
I wonder what “interaction” might mean. /sarcasm
@Daniel Ream, who said:
One should take care not to automatically assume that “silence” equates to “non-presence”, anywhere. I’ve been perusing the esteemed Mr. Thompson’s blog now for lo these many years; it’s just that I’ve rarely come into the comment section to say anything.
I am not possessed of a charitable mien, nor do I suffer fools gladly. Which leads to rather a lot of condemnation when I point out folly in all quarters.
I would, in your posting’s case, point out that we will get that “inevitable violent civil war over these issues” precisely because that is what we are allowing to happen. That’s the price of civic sloth; you stand by while the arseholes who’ve graciously put themselves up for election to tyrannize their fellow citizens act upon their baser instincts, looking the other way whilst they pillage and plunder the public fisc?
You get precisely the government you deserve. The outrages of things like the Solyndra BS happened because the voters of Chicago foisted their political corruption upon the nation in the form of Barack Obama, and he and his took the opportunity to loot with glee. Nobody had the will, and certainly not their partners-in-crime on the “Republican” side of Congress, to do a damn thing about. I suppose it’s because they were disarmed and charmed by the “Wise Negro” thing, but I knew that rat bastard for a grifter from day one. Any fool voting for anyone who came up in the Chicago Machine could have told you what was coming, and here we are.
Again, a lack of civic diligence and virtue has gotten us here. Why, do you suppose, all these petty officials like mayors and school board members are so confident in their power that they use that power to shut down discussion in their public meetings? It’s because they’ve no accountability whatsoever, and face no consequence for their malfeasance.
A good tradition of the Revolutionary War days was that of the tar bucket and feather bag; if nothing else, it taught public officials a bit of humility. I would suggest that before we go too far towards excess that it might be a good idea to bring back such non-lethal checks on authority and its abuse, so that we don’t wind up with the tumbrils rolling towards the guillotine again.
In the final analysis, this is all of our fault, and the only real “fix” is to clean out the Augean stables of governance, and then ensure they don’t fill again. Nobody has mucked the damn things out in generations, and that leads to the same thing that allows massive forest fires: Excessive undergrowth creating the fuel for a major conflagration.
Coupla data points in regards to what I’m talking about:
https://x.com/ClownWorld_/status/1837919581995966784
https://abc7chicago.com/dolton-illinois-mayor-tiffany-henyard-scandal/14491732/
What you see here is the result of “victory at any cost” politicization of government. The Democrats know damn good and well that their two mayors here are corrupt and venal… Yet, they’re going to keep voting for them because “Democrat”. Zero accountability, zero responsibility taken for putting these two creatures into office under their imprimatur.
Not that the Republicans are any better, where they’ve done the same thing. The shamelessness with which they do it is what irks me… It wasn’t just Hunter Biden getting the money in Ukraine or China; you can find grifters on both sides of the aisle right alongside him.
And, why is this happening?
Because the voters are simply not taking responsibility. They aren’t doing their jobs as citizens, responsible adults with agency. These innumerable assholes infesting government? THEY WORK FOR YOU; not the other way around.
They only have the power and authority that you grant them. If they misuse it, it is up to you to take it back, and to punish the malefactors.
We do not do enough of that. I can about guarantee you that if there’d been a few incidents like what happened to that Dutch Prime Minister and his brother back in the day, the political hacks of the world might be taking a far less abusive tone with the rest of us. I’m not saying that we ought to be opening up open-air barbecues there in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but you do have to admit that such an event would almost certainly have a salutary effect on our politician’s conduct.
You do have to marvel at the current crop of Dutch politicians, though: That’s the sole Western nation I’m aware of where the constituents turned on and ate their politicians, which is the proper thing to do, when they overstep their bounds. Do they not teach that bit of Dutch history, in schools these days?
Not so sure about the health ‘n safety aspects of it all, but I do believe it would encourage some probity and rectitude in our political classes.
Related articles clarify it: it looks as though the police spotted the car speeding, started following it with sirens and lights, and may have given chase (though the police are a bit coy on that).
Western civilization has become governance, by, for, and at the expense of those three standard deviations below the lowest common denominator.
@Das,
At whose acquiescence and outright apathy…?
If we want this fixed, then we have to do something. Doing nothing means we’re fine with the way it’s going, and since we don’t fight it when we see it, at any level?
We get what we deserve.
It really starts with the little stuff… Looking the other way while a co-worker pilfers from the company, or robs a customer. Not taking action, when seeing something that’s clearly wrong in front of our eyes, thinking “This is someone else’s problem…”
Sad reality? It’s all of our problems. All the time… If you tolerate it, they just get more and more entrenched, more entitled, more prevalent.
The urge to forgive them their trespasses, to be lenient? Offer up excuses? That’s a large part of why this is happening. You have no standards, then there are no standards elsewhere in society. You can’t pick out a couple of threads, and expect the whole piece of cloth to be just as good as though you did not; the fraying of social order begins and ends with the individual.
Yet more proof that a return to capital punishment would improve the lives of the whole.
Those repeat burglers would then have served time for the first offence, then a second bout with the warning that the next time the judge could choose to confer the death penalty for being antisocial scumbags.
Would they have then stopped? Maybe but either way the third conviction could have seen them publicly hanged and with a result they could no longer behave as bandits.